Daughter of the Year That Was
by PrincessDaydream77
Summary: Slightly AU. After the paradox machine was destroyed at the hands of Captain Jack Harkness, the year that occurred disappeared from history without a trace. Only that wasn't quite true. This is the story of Clarelia Lucretia Saxon, the only living evidence of a year of living hell.
1. A Strange Connection

Daughter of the Year That Was

Summary: Slightly AU. After the paradox machine was destroyed at the hands of Captain Jack Harkness, the year that occurred disappeared from history without a trace. Only that wasn't quite true. This is the story of Clarelia Lucretia Saxon, the only living evidence of a year of living hell.

Disclaimer: I only own Clarelia, nothing else.

Chapter One

There she stood once more, as she had done each day since before she could remember. She didn't even truly know why she had begun to stop before the prison gates, to share glances with a blonde haired prisoner so strangely familiar, yet, like so many other things in her life, for an unknown reason. But strangely enough, it was comforting. Though she did not know why, Clarelia was comforted by Broadfell.

The young girl had often asked herself whether it was abnormal, to seek refuge outside the prison gates, or from a woman within a cell, but had given up on the question long ago. After all, she could not remember a time when she'd been considered normal.

The blonde turned away from the bars to glance up the hill that Broadfell rested on. She could see the darkened building from where she stood, much to her displeasure. '_It seems that Broadfell will follow me wherever I go._' the young girl thought, as she stared up towards the ancestral stone. However, that certain Broadfell gave the child no comfort at all, as she looked not towards the prison, but towards the children's institution of the same name. The institution that she had called home since before she could speak the word.

The institution was no home to the young girl, it never had been. Homes were places where children felt loved, safe and wanted. Clarelia had never felt that at Broadfell, only feelings of toleration, that the matron wanted to get rid of her as soon as she could. Unfortunately, as an orphan with no family, the child could not leave until she turned eighteen, a full eleven years away.

Besides, even when she did leave, she would have nowhere to go. She had no money, no family, no place to call her own. Broadfell was all she knew. Bar the primary school she had attended since she was four years old, the girl had barely ever stepped out of the institution. She knew nothing of the world she would be walking into.

The girl shook her head slightly, bringing herself out of her contemplation of darkness. It was just another day for the blonde, nothing out of the ordinary at all, and so she did not know why such miserable thoughts were running through her mind. There was a chill in the air that was harsher than any winter she had known, and Clarelia could not prevent herself from shivering at it. '_Perhaps there is something that isn't right.'_ the girl thought, but shrugged off the feelings as efficiently as she could do at her age, though with the amount of practice she had had at burying emotions, this was not difficult.

And so she returned reluctantly to the hell that was the institution in which she lived, knowing that they would have come out to look for her soon anyway, and that it was not worth getting herself punished for being late back, as the punishment would most likely be being escorted home like the younger children, and if that happened, then she would never see the blonde woman again. For some reason, one that she could not quite could not quite put her finger on, the child did not want to risk being separated from a prison inmate whom she had never spoken a word to.

Of course, she had been punished for being tardy in her return, but the woman that had seen her come through the door was a touch nicer than the others, and had consented for her to merely be locked in her room until the morning, instead of the more permanent punishment she had been expecting. There was nothing to do in her bedroom other than look out of the window at the town below. In the distance, the vast areas of lights that covered central London could just about be seen, and the girl took a little bit of time to admire the urban beauty of them, but in truth, she mainly focused on the eerie illumination of the sign that advertised the location of the prison. She just hoped that her awful feelings were not prophetic, as they had been, on occasion, in the past.

Somehow, even with the buzzing thoughts in her brain, Clarelia found herself unable to keep her eyes open, and soon drifted off into a troubled sleep, the blackness providing only a temporary relief from the awful thoughts in her mind. But even that did not last long, for early in the morning, just at the moment the sun began to emerge on the horizon, an almighty crash sounded, and the ground beneath even the institution shook with the impact.

The blonde girl awoke with a start, blinking the sleep rapidly from her eyes and bolting from under the covers, making for her window, where a golden glow was reflected in the glass. From the height of Broadfell Children's Home, the flames could easily be seen licking the darkness of the night sky, burning as brightly as the stars themselves. Tears pricked at the young girl's eyelids, as there was not a shadow of a doubt in her mind that the fire was all that now remained of the prison she had passed just hours earlier. It was gone now, all of it, and she would be as well. All that would now remain of the woman would be a pile of cinders and bones.

As the tears began to flow down her cheeks, Clarelia leant her face forward against the window, watching as her tears rolled down the glass like raindrops. Even the windowpane was now beginning to heat a little, due to the intensity of the flames. The cold was hardly gone by the time the girl had fallen into a deep and troubled sleep.

She did not hear the whooshing sound outside her window, nor did she see the blue box appear out of nowhere.

A/N: Please review for me!


	2. A Second Time

Chapter Two

A/N: Thank you to TheDoctor'sAmazingCompanion for reviewing the first chapter. By the way, this chapter will be more about the Doctor's point of view. These will crop up once in a while. Enjoy!

Throwing open the door to the TARDIS, the Doctor hoped beyond hope that he was not too late, and prepared himself to enter the prison in time to prevent the ritual that was sure to be taking place. The Ood had shown him Lucy Saxon for a reason, he was sure, and that reason must have been to save her, from the Master and from her love for him.

But the sight before him was not a prison, rather a pile of rubble with vague wisps of smoke curling up from it. He was too late to save her, and for the second time, he had allowed his old friend's wife to fall victim.

Taking a deep breath in through his mouth, and tasting the smoke filled air on his tongue, the Doctor steeled himself, taking one step forward, then another and another, forcing himself to keep moving, though all his mind told him to do was run.

He had only walked for a few metres, a dozen at most, when the most horrific sights came into his eye line. The space must have been where the hall had been, where the resurrection ceremony had taken place, as the area was littered with bodies, those of Saxon's followers and alike, those who had opposed him. It barely took a moment for the Time Lord to spot the blonde hair amongst the figures.

As he moved further forward, the man noted that the bodies, strangely enough for having been in an explosion, were utterly unmarked. They were not blackened, burnt or deformed in the least, just pale and cold. In fact, most appeared to the untrained eye to be simply sleeping. '_If only they were.'_ he thought bitterly to himself, as he considered the fact that, had he been quicker, he could have saved them all. '_The resurrection may have not scarred them, it might have given them clean deaths, but they were still deaths, deaths that I could have stopped.'_

He paused in the very middle of the rubble, where grey cloth blended into the fallen stones, though they had been charred a little by the flames, leaving her blonde hair standing out quite clearly against their darkness. It had been loosely tied, as the band still remained hanging from the stands of hair, snapped by the force of the blast, but now lay fanned across the woman's face, hiding her features from view.

Bending down to his knees, the Doctor gently pushed the golden locks to the side, revealing the face of Lucy Saxon. Her eyes were barely closed, for she must have died so suddenly, and her lips were still vaguely parted, the only remaining evidence of the cry for help he heard echo in his mind. '_If only I'd been quicker.'_

However, when the man gently stroked his fingertips down the edge of the blonde woman's face, moving the last remaining tendrils of hair away from it, he saw something that stopped all thoughts of his regret, leaving only the shock which overwhelmed his mind, and then, once that haze had passed, the momentary joy. He saw an eyelash flicker.

"Lucy?" the Time Lord questioned in a whisper, unwilling to speak any louder, in case the movement had been no more than a trick of the light. And for a few seconds, when no response was given, the man was certain that it had been nothing more than that. With a sigh, he turned his head away, trying to mask the choking guilt that took over his mind once again. But then he heard a voice, and this time, the Doctor knew that there was no more chance that it could be an illusion.

"Doctor?" came a choked whisper, the small female voice tinged with smoke, disuse and screaming. The head of the dark haired man snapped downwards, to the source of the voice, and he saw that it had indeed been Lucy Saxon who had addressed him.

"What have you done?" the man questioned, though he knew full well the answer. The weakening woman seemed to smile for just a moment, the kind of smile a child would give when asked something they had told the asker a thousand times before. Then she began to cough, breathing as deeply as she could do, though it was clearly becoming more of a struggle by the second. At a loss as to what else he could do, the Doctor pulled the trembling woman into his lap, holding her hands tightly in his, hoping only to offer her what little comfort was possible.

"I tried to stop him." she began, once her breath had returned enough to do so. She coughed slightly at the end of the sentence, but instead of trying to catch her breath, she continued as quickly as possible. It was clear to the old man that she did not have long left, and it seemed that she knew this just as well as he did. "I couldn't let him become that man, the man that loved the sound of a drumbeat calling him to war. The man I knew, he hated the drums. He'd always tried to run from them, always been scared of them. The man I knew would never miss the sound that drove him insane. And so I tried to stop him. Not hard enough."

"You did your best, Lucy. You tried to stop him." the Doctor comforted, nodding his head solemnly. He could clearly see now the tears surfacing in her deep brown eyes, could imagine the extent of the pain she was experiencing, and the admiration took over the guilt in his heart for just a moment.

Lucy continued to speak, her voice raw with the effort of speaking against the smoke that choked it, but still, she persevered, forcing the sparse phrase from her mouth. "Please help her." she sighed, coughing through the pain and whimpering as it became unbearable. The man opened his mouth to ask who she meant, but she continued far too quickly for him to do so. "Please, tell her… I love her. I'm… sorry. I love her so much, and… I'm…"

But then she stopped, and the Time Lord watched in anguish as the woman's eyes became fixed in place, her hands loose and becoming colder in his by the moment. The Doctor sighed deeply, blinking a few tears back from his own eyes, before his head dropped down in his sadness.

Through his thoughts of guilt and remorse, he was so absorbed that, even when he turned around, focused now on returning to the TARDIS, he hardly noticed the girl stood at the top of the hill. But what he did not miss the spark of electricity that coursed through his veins at the sight of her.

A/N: Please review!


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